There are seven big problems every marketer will face, and one problem everyone—no matter what your industry—will face, says Professor Bernard Jaworski, the Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University.
On Friday, October 20, Jaworski will lead a full day, interactive lecture and workshop on understanding and applying solutions to the problems that will shape marketing for the next decade. The “Seven Big Problems Facing Marketing,” released last year, is AMA’s first ever intellectual agenda, and is reshaping the discussion on the future of marketing and how you and your company will deal with them.
After speaking with AMA Houston, Jaworski agreed to discuss one problem that is very much on the top of his mind.
“Organic growth is really a timeless issue for many, many companies,” Jaworski said. “Not that the other problems aren’t just as important, but this is very top of mind for everyone.”
According to Jaworski, if you look at surveys of CEO performances and you ask who is a high performing CEO, you’ll find one of the key performance metrics is the level of organic growth in a company. By this, Jaworski doesn’t mean mergers and acquisitions— it’s through the addition of products or markets you are already serving.
“High-growth companies become low growth all the time,” Ken Favaro with David Meer and Samrat Sharma wrote for the Harvard Business Review. “Many CEOs accept that as an inevitable sign that their businesses have matured, and so they stop looking internally for big growth. Instead, they become serial acquirers of smaller companies or seek a ‘transformative’ acquisition of another large business, preferably a high-growth one.”
This issue of course is not just a marketing issue, but one of the seven problems where Jaworski says marketers play an important role of helping shape the company.
“NVIDIA is a great example of a company managing this well,” Jaworski said. “NVIDIA currently owns 70 percent of the PC graphics market, and their growth is still skyrocketing.”
During his discussion, Jaworski will take everyone through a case study of NVIDIA and help them understand what they can do to drive growth in their own markets. Equal time will be allocated to discussing organic growth and the six other problems, and during the day you will do five things: raise and define the issues, look at case studies such as NVIDIA, give yourself a diagnostic to score yourselves on this problem and then you’ll finish the conversation with how you can improve.
“The idea is to get the problem in your head, give you some examples of best in class practices, show the evidence about what you need to do to change and then have a little bit of a conversation about how you can improve,” Jaworski said.
According to Jaworski, a large part in creating organic growth is creating a feedback-loop. Driving organic growth through deep, deep knowledge of your consumer. Companies with great organic growth don’t just do outbound marketing, but ask afterwards how to take a new approach with their products and improve them.
“Marketing is not just strategic marketing communications,” said Jaworski.” In this case it is driving new product develop, design and solutions.”
Does your company have a problem with organic growth or one of the other six problems? Join us Friday, October 20, when Professor Bernard Jaworski will help you recognize the seven problems and teach you how to face them.